Jack Ma-led Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s fintech conglomerate Ant Financial considers blockchain technology as one of the five key technologies that will dominate every industry in the long-term.

Ant Financial Hopes to Use Blockchain in its Core Businesses
At the TechCrunch International City Event held in Hangzhou this week, Zhang Hui, the director of Blockchain Department at Ant Financial, stated that alongside AI, Security, IoT, and computing, blockchain is a key technology the company is actively developing and testing to implement it at a large commercial scale.

Zhang noted that in terms of immutability and decentralization, blockchain technology in its current form is impeccable. It is able to process sensitive data and personal information in a peer-to-peer manner without the involvement of intermediaries. However, Zhang emphasized that scalability is a major issue of blockchain technology that needs to be addressed to bring in conglomerates and industry leaders into the blockchain sector.

In the long-term, Zhang and the rest of his team at Ant Financial believe the company will implement blockchain technology onto its core businesses and platforms, as Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma suggested in 2017. But, in order for the technology to have significant impact on existing financial infrastructures, its capacity will need to be improved exponentially to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second.